Trade wars aren't actually stopping global trade because individual companies are just ignoring the politics and doing their own thing.
SocArXiv · March 13, 2026 · gwuce_v1
Why it matters
While we expect trade wars to cause 'deglobalization,' trade hasn't actually dropped. This is because resilience depends on whether a specific company controls a 'chokepoint' or has the organizational capacity to reroute its supply chain, meaning companies in the same sector can have opposite outcomes under the same sanctions.
From the abstract
As states weaponize supply chains, warnings of deglobalization and aggregate welfare losses have proliferated. But neither has materialized: trade volumes remain high and supply chains continue to span the globe. This paper argues that the surprising resilience of aggregate trade obscures a large-scale redistribution creating K-shaped divergence among firms navigating geoeconomic reordering. Who wins and who loses depends on two dimensions of corporate power: the strategic indispensability of wh